Fedora 11 nerfed my mixer

[Bastien Nocera]

On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 12:13 -0600, Stephen Warren wrote:
> On Tue, April 21, 2009 6:50 am, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 23:29 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> >> So, the shiny new pulseaudio mixer setup in F11 took away my ability to
> >> tell the panel applet which channel to use. It seems to insist on
> >> messing with the master. I have a second computer hooked in to the line
> >> in, so it can share speakers with my main box. I had it set up so the
> >> master volume was set on maximum, and the panel volume thingy adjusted
> >> the PCM volume. This allowed me to adjust volumes separately, the
> >> secondary box stayed at a constant volume and the main box could be
> >> adjusted freely without affecting the secondary machine.
> >>
> >> How do I get this behavior back?
> >
> > _This_ behaviour, no. Any reasons why you don't use PulseAudio over the
> > network instead?
> >
> > I'm afraid that your use of the volume control wasn't really something
> > we thought about, and I'm not sure that's a use case we're that
> > interested in catering for.
> 
> I think I also rely on this use-case (i.e. telling the mixer which
> channel(s) to control).

No, you don't rely on this use-case. You rely on the same work-around.

> I forget the exact names, but my laptop has separate volume controls for
> the built-in bass and non-bass speakers. In older Fedora releases, this
> "just worked". In F9 (I think), the mixer (and volume buttons on the front
> of the laptop) started to control only the non-bass speaker volume, so
> that the bass volume was always maxed out, which wasn't usable. I had to
> configure the mixer to control both the bass and non-bass mixer channels
> together (and I think I had to hack the alsa configuration to actually
> create the bass mixer channel at all, or something like that)
> 
> So, is this all handled in a better (i.e. automatic) fashion now, or is
> the lack of channel selection going to be another regression for me?

If both mixers should be handled as one, then it should be PulseAudio or
ALSA making that connection between the mixer tracks.

File a bug against PulseAudio with the output of "amixer -c0", the names
of the tracks that should be handled together, and the name of your
sound driver. I'm pretty sure this can be fixed without resorting to a
work-around.